Midnight (29 page)

Young Chrissie,
she thought,
undeniably courageous and clever, was nonetheless too polite for her own good. While standing on the priest’s porch, debating the proper etiquette of an early-morning visit, she suddenly was snatched up by slavering, nine-eyed aliens and eaten on the spot. Fortunately she was too dead to hear the way they belched and farted after eating her, for surely her refined sensibilities would have been gravely offended.

She rang the bell. Twice.

A moment later a shadowy and strangely lumpish figure appeared beyond the crackle-finished, diamond-shaped panes in the top half of the door. She almost turned and ran but told herself that the glass was distorting the image and that the figure beyond was not actually grotesque.

Father Castelli opened the door and blinked in surprise when he saw her. He was wearing black slacks, a black shirt, a Roman collar, and a tattered gray cardigan, so he hadn’t been fast asleep, thank God. He was a shortish man, about five feet seven, and round but not really fat, with black hair going gray at the temples. Even his proud beak of a nose was not enough to dilute the effect of his otherwise soft features, which gave him a gentle and compassionate appearance.

He blinked again—this was the first time Chrissie had seen him without his glasses—and said, “Chrissie?” He smiled, and she knew that she had done the right thing by coming to him, because his smile was warm and open and loving.

“Whatever brings you here at this hour, in this weather?” He looked past her to the rest of the porch and the walkway beyond. “Where’re your parents?”

“Father,” she said, not altogether surprised to hear her voice crack, “I have to see you.”

His smile wavered. “Is something wrong?”

“Yes, Father. Very wrong. Terribly, awfully wrong.”

“Come in, then, come in. You’re soaked!” He ushered her into the foyer and closed the door. “Dear girl, what
is
this all about?”

“Aliens, F-f-father, ” she said, as a chill made her stutter.

“Come on back to the kitchen,” he said. “It’s the warmest room in the house. I was just fixing breakfast.”

“I’ll ruin the carpet,” she said, indicating the oriental runner that lay the length of the hallway, with oak flooring on both sides.

“Oh, don’t worry about that. It’s an old thing, but it stands up well to abuse. Sort of like me! Would you like some hot cocoa? I was making breakfast, including a big pot of piping hot cocoa.”

She followed him gratefully back the dimly lighted hall, which smelled of lemon oil and pine disinfectant and vaguely of incense.

The kitchen was homey. A well-worn, yellow linoleum floor. Pale yellow walls. Dark wood cabinets with white porcelain handles. Gray and yellow Formica counter tops. There were appliances-refrigerator, oven, microwave oven, toaster, electric can opener—as in any kitchen, which surprised her, though when she thought about it, she didn’t know why she would have expected it to be any different. Priests needed appliances too. They couldn’t just summon up a fiery angel to toast some bread or work a miracle to brew a pot of hot cocoa.

The place smelled wonderful. Cocoa was brewing. Toast was toasting. Sausages were sizzling over a low flame on the gas stove.

Father Castelli showed her to one of the four padded vinyl chairs at the chrome and Formica breakfast set, then scurried about, taking care of her as if she were a chick and he a mother hen. He rushed upstairs, returned with two clean, fluffy bath towels, and said, “Dry your hair and blot your damp clothes with one of them, then wrap the other one around you like a shawl. It’ll help you get warm.” While she was following his instructions, he went to the bathroom off the downstairs hall and fetched two aspirins. He put those on the table in front of her and said, “I’ll get you some orange juice to take them with. Lots of vitamin C in orange juice. Aspirin and vitamin C are like a one-two punch; they’ll knock a cold right out of you before it can take up residence.” When he returned with the juice, he stood for a moment looking down at her, shaking his head, and she figured she must look bedraggled and pitiful. “Dear girl, what on
earth
have you been up to?” He seemed not to have heard what she’d said about aliens when she’d first crossed his threshold. “No, wait. You can tell me over breakfast. Would you like some breakfast?”

“Yes, please, Father. I’m starved. The only thing I’ve eaten since yesterday afternoon was a couple of Hershey bars.”

“Nothing but Hershey bars?” He sighed. “Chocolate is one of God’s graces, but it’s also a tool the devil uses to lead us into temptation—the temptation of gluttony.” He patted his round belly. “l, myself, have often partaken of this particular grace, but I would
never
“—he exaggerated the word “never” and winked at her—“never, not ever, heed the devil’s call to overindulge! But, see here, if you’ve been eating only chocolate, your teeth will fall out. So … I’ve got plenty of sausages, plenty to share. I was about to cook a couple of eggs for myself too. Would you like a couple of eggs?”

“Yes, please.”

“And toast?”

“Yes.”

“We’ve got some wonderful cinnamon sweetrolls there on the table. And the hot chocolate, of course.”

Chrissie washed down the two aspirins with orange juice.

As he carefully cracked eggs into the hot frying pan, Father Castelli glanced at her again. “Are you all right?”

“Yes, Father.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. Now. I’m all right now.”

“It’ll be nice having company for breakfast,” he said.

Chrissie drank the rest of her juice.

He said, “When Father O’Brien finishes saying Mass, he never wants to eat. Nervous stomach.” He chuckled. “They all have bad stomachs when they’re new. For the first few months they’re scared to death up there on the altar. It’s such a sacred duty, you see, offering the Mass, and the young priests are always afraid of flubbing up in some way that’ll be … oh, I don’t know … that’ll be an insult to God, I guess. But God doesn’t insult very easily. If He did, He’d have washed His hands of the human race a long time ago! All young priests come to that realization eventually, and then they’re fine. Then they come back from saying Mass, and they’re ready to run through the entire week’s food budget in one breakfast.”

She knew that he was talking just to soothe her. He had noticed how distraught she was. He wanted to settle her down so they could discuss it in a calm, reasonable manner. She didn’t mind. She needed to be soothed.

Having cracked all four eggs, he turned the sausages with a fork, then opened a drawer and took out a spatula, which he placed on the counter near the egg pan. As he got plates, knives, and forks for the table, he said, “You look more than a little scared, Chrissie, like you’d just seen a ghost. You can calm down now. After so many years of schooling and training, if a young priest can be afraid of making a mistake at Mass, then anyone can be afraid of anything. Most fears are things we create in our own minds, and we can banish them as easily as we called them forth.”

“Maybe not this one,” she said.

“We’ll see.”

He transferred eggs and sausages from frying pans to plates.

For the first time in twenty-four hours, the world seemed
right
. As Father Castelli put the food on the table and encouraged her to dig in, Chrissie sighed with relief and hunger.

8

Shaddack usually went to bed after dawn, so by seven o’clock Thursday morning he was yawning and rubbing at his eyes as he cruised through Moonlight Cove, looking for a place to hide the van and sleep for a few hours safely beyond Loman Watkins’s reach. The day was overcast, gray and dim, yet the sunlight seared his eyes.

He remembered Paula Parkins, who’d been torn apart by regressives back in September. Her 1.5-acre property was secluded, at the most rural end of town. Though the dead woman’s family—in Colorado—had put it up for sale through a local real-estate agent, it had not sold. He drove out there, parked in the empty garage, cut the engine, and pulled the big door down behind him.

He ate a ham sandwich and drank a Coke. Brushing crumbs from his fingers, he curled up on the blankets in the back of the van and drifted toward sleep.

He never suffered insomnia, perhaps because he was so sure of his role in life, his destiny, and he had no concern about tomorrow. He was absolutely convinced he would bend the future to his agenda.

All of his life Shaddack had seen signs of his uniqueness, omens that foretold his ultimate triumph in any pursuit he undertook.

Initially he had noticed those signs only because Don Runningdeer had pointed them out to him. Runningdeer had been an Indian—of what tribe, Shaddack had never been able to learn—who had worked for the judge, Shaddack’s father, back in Phoenix, as a full-time gardener and all-around handyman. Runningdeer was lean and quick, with a weathered face, ropy muscles, and calloused hands; his eyes were bright and as black as oil, singularly powerful eyes from which you sometimes had to look away … and from which you sometimes could
not
look away, no matter how much you might want to. The Indian took an interest in young Tommy Shaddack, occasionally letting him help with some yard chores and household repairs, when neither the judge nor Tommy’s mother was around to disapprove of their boy doing common labor or associating with “social inferiors.” Which meant he hung out with Runningdeer almost constantly between the ages of five and twelve, the period during which the Indian had worked for the judge, because his parents were hardly ever there to see and object.

One of the earliest detailed memories he had was of Runningdeer and the sign of the self-devouring snake… .

He had been five years old, sprawled on the rear patio of the big house in Phoenix, among a collection of Tonka Toys, but he’d been more interested in Runningdeer than in the miniature trucks and cars. The Indian was wearing jeans and boots, shirtless in the bright desert sun, trimming shrubs with a large pair of wood-handled shears. The muscles in Runningdeer’s back, shoulders, and arms worked fluidly, stretching and flexing, and Tommy was fascinated by the man’s physical power. The judge, Tommy’s father, was thin, bony, and pale. Tommy himself, at five, was already visibly his father’s son, fair and tall for his age and painfully thin. By the day he showed Tommy the selfdevouring snake, Runningdeer had been working for the Shaddacks two weeks, and Tommy had been increasingly drawn to him without fully understanding why. Runningdeer often had a smile for him and told funny stories about talking coyotes and rattlesnakes and other desert animals. Sometimes he called Tommy “Little Chief,” which was the first nickname anyone had given him. His mother always called him Tommy or Tom; the judge called him Thomas. So he sprawled among his Tonka Toys, playing with them less and less, until at last he stopped playing altogether and simply watched Runningdeer, as if mesmerized.

He was not sure how long he lay entranced in the patio shade, in the hot dry air of the desert day, but after a while he was surprised to hear Runningdeer call to him.

“Little Chief, come look at this.”

He was in such a daze that at first he could not respond. His arms and legs would not work. He seemed to have been turned to stone.

“Come on, come on, Little Chief. You’ve
got
to see this.”

At last Tommy sprang up and ran out onto the lawn, to the hedges surrounding the swimming pool, where Runningdeer had been trimming.

“This is a rare thing,” Runningdeer said in a somber voice, and he pointed to a green snake that lay at his feet on the sun-warmed decking around the pool.

Tommy began to pull back in fear.

But the Indian seized him by the arm, held him close, and said, “Don’t be afraid. It’s only a harmless garden snake. It’s not going to hurt you. In fact it’s been sent here as a sign to you.”

Tommy stared wide-eyed at the eighteen-inch reptile, which was curled to form an 0, its own tail in its mouth, as if eating itself. The serpent was motionless, glassy eyes unblinking. Tommy thought it was dead, but the Indian assured him that it was alive.

“This is a great and powerful sign that all Indians know,” said Runningdeer. He squatted in front of the snake and pulled the boy down beside him.

“It is a sign,” he whispered, “a SUPERNATURAL sign, sent from the great spirits, and it’s always meant for a young boy, so it must have been meant for you. A very powerful sign.”

Staring wonderingly at the snake, Tommy said, “Sign? What do you mean? It’s not a sign. It’s a snake.”

“An omen. A presentiment. A sacred sign,” Runningdeer said.

As they hunkered before the snake, he explained such things to Tommy in an intense, whispery voice, all the while holding him by one arm. Sun glare bounced off the concrete decking. Shimmering waves of heat rose from it too. The snake lay so motionless that it might have been an incredibly detailed jeweled choker rather than a real snake—each scale a chip of emerald, twin rubies for the eyes. After a while Tommy drifted back into the queer trance that he’d been in while lying on the patio, and Runningdeer’s voice slithered serpentlike into his head, deep inside his skull, curling and sliding through his brain.

Stranger still, it began to seem that the voice was not really Runningdeer’s at all, but the snake’s. He stared unwaveringly at the viper and almost forgot that Runningdeer was there, for what the snake said to him was so compelling and exciting that it filled Tommy’s senses, demanded his entire attention, even though he did not fully understand what he was hearing. This is a sign of destiny, the snake said, a sign of power and destiny, and you will be a man of great power, far greater than your father, a man to whom others will bow down, a man who will be obeyed, a man who will never fear the future because he will
make
the future, and you will have anything you want, anything in the world. But for now, said the snake, this is to be our secret. No one must know that I’ve brought this message to you, that the sign has been delivered, for if they know that you are destined to hold power over them, they will surely kill you, slit your throat in the night, tear out your heart, and bury you in a deep grave. They must not know that you are the king-to-be, a god-on-earth, or they will smash you before your strength has fully flowered. Secret. This is our secret. I am the self-devouring snake, and I will eat myself and vanish now that I’ve delivered this message, and no one will know I’ve been here. Trust the Indian but no one else.

No one. Ever.

Tommy fainted on the pool decking and was ill for two days. The doctor was baffled. The boy had no fever, no detectable swelling of lymph glands, no nausea, no soreness in the joints or muscles, no pain whatsoever. He was merely gripped by a profound malaise, so lethargic that he did not even want to bother holding a comic book; watching TV was too much effort. He had no appetite. He slept fourteen hours a day and lay in a daze most of the rest of the time. “Perhaps mild sunstroke,” the doctor said, “and if he doesn’t snap out of it in a couple of days, we’ll put him in the hospital for tests.”

During the day, when the judge was in court or meeting with his investment associates, and when Tommy’s mother was at the country club or at one of her charity luncheons, Runningdeer slipped into the house now and then to sit by the boy’s bed for ten minutes. He told Tommy stories, speaking in that soft and strangely rhythmic voice.

Miss Karval, their live-in housekeeper and part-time nanny, knew that neither the judge nor Mrs. Shaddack would approve of the Indian’s sickbed visits or any of his other associations with Tommy. But Miss Karval was kindhearted, and she disapproved of the lack of attention that the Shaddacks gave to their offspring. And she liked the Indian. She turned her head because she saw no harm in it—if Tommy promised not to tell his folks how much time he spent with Runningdeer.

Just when they decided to admit the boy to a hospital for tests, he recovered, and the doctor’s diagnosis of sunstroke was accepted. Thereafter, Tommy tagged along with Runningdeer most days from the time his father and mother left the house until one of them returned. When he started going to school, he came right home after classes; he was never interested when other kids invited him to their houses to play, for he was eager to spend a couple of hours with Runningdeer before his mother or father appeared in the late afternoon.

And week by week, month by month, year by year, the Indian made Tommy acutely aware of signs that foretold his great though as yet unspecified-destiny. A patch of four-leaf clovers under the boy’s bedroom window. A dead rat floating in the swimming pool. A score of chirruping crickets in one of the boy’s bureau drawers when he came home from school one afternoon. Occasionally coins appeared where he had not left them—a penny in every shoe in his closet; a month later, a nickel in every pocket of every pair of his pants; later still, a shiny silver dollar
inside
an apple that Runningdeer was peeling for him—and the Indian regarded the coins with awe, explaining that they were some of the most powerful signs of all.

“Secret,” Runningdeer whispered portentously on the day after Tommy’s ninth birthday, when the boy reported hearing soft bells ringing under his window in the middle of the night.

On arising, he had seen nothing but a candle burning on the lawn. Careful not to wake his parents, he sneaked outside to take a closer look at the candle, but it was gone.

“Always keep these signs secret, or they’ll realize that you’re a child of destiny, that one day you’ll have tremendous power over them, and they’ll kill you now, while you’re still a boy, and weak.”

“Who’s ‘they’?” Tommy asked.

“They, them, everyone,” the Indian said mysteriously.

“But who?”

“Your father, for one.”

“Not him.”

“Him especially,” Runningdeer whispered. “He’s a man of power. He enjoys having power over others, intimidating, armtwisting to get his way. You’ve seen how people bow and scrape to him.”

Indeed, Tommy had noticed the respect with which everyone spoke to his father—especially his many friends in politics—and a couple of times had glimpsed the unsettling and perhaps more honest looks they gave the judge behind his back. They appeared to admire and even revere him to his face, but when he was not looking they seemed not only to fear but loathe him.

“He is satisfied only when he has all the power, and he won’t let go of it easily, not for anyone, not even for his son. If he finds out that you’re destined to be greater and more powerful than he is … no one can save you then. Not even me.”

Perhaps if their family life had been marked by more affection, Tommy would have found the Indian’s warning difficult to accept. But his father seldom spoke to him in more than a perfunctory way, and even more seldom touched him—never a real hug and
never
a kiss.

Sometimes Runningdeer brought a gift of homemade candy for the boy. “Cactus candy,” he called it. There was always just one piece for each of them, and they always ate it together, either sitting on the patio when the Indian was on his lunch break, or as Tommy followed his mentor around the two-acre property on a series of chores. Soon after eating the cactus candy, the boy was overcome by a curious mood. He felt euphoric. When he moved, he seemed to float. Colors were brighter, prettier. The most vivid thing of all was Runningdeer: His hair was impossibly black, his skin a beautiful bronze, his teeth radiantly white, his eyes as dark as the end of the universe. Every sound—even the crisp
snick-snick-snick
of hedge clippers, the roar of a plane passing overhead on its way to Phoenix airport, the insect-hum of the pool motor—became music; the world was full of music, though the most musical of all things was Runningdeer’s voice. Odors also became sharper flowers, cut grass, the oil with which the Indian lubricated his tools. Even the stink of perspiration was pleasant. running deer smelled like fresh-baked bread and hay and copper pennies.

Tommy seldom remembered what Runningdeer talked about after they ate their cactus candy, but he did recall that the Indian spoke to him with a special intensity. A lot of it had to do with the sign of the moonhawk. “If the great spirits send the sign of the moonhawk, you’ll know you’re to have tremendous power and be invincible. Invincible! But if you
do
see the moonhawk, it’ll mean the great spirits want something from you in return an act that will truly prove your worthiness.” That much stuck with Tommy, but he remembered little else. Usually, after an hour, he grew weary and went to his room to nap; his dreams then were particularly vivid, more real than waking life, and always involved the Indian. They were simultaneously frightening and comforting dreams.

On a rainy Saturday in November, when Tommy was ten, he sat on a stool by the workbench at one end of the four-car garage, watching as Runningdeer repaired an electric carving knife that the judge always used to slice the turkey on Thanksgiving and Christmas. The air was pleasantly cool and unusually humid for Phoenix. Runningdeer and Tommy were talking about the rain, the upcoming holiday, and things that had happened at school recently. They didn’t always talk about signs and destiny, or otherwise Tommy might not have liked the Indian so much; Runningdeer was a great listener.

When the Indian finished repairing the electric knife, he plugged it in and switched it on. The blade shivered back and forth so fast that the cutting edge was a blur.